W2 Upgrades? 1603 18

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about coding, what it entails, costs, how much works has to be done, or if it is even possible without changing the game completely. However, here are some of my new ideas for the server (Please comment on the possibility, impossibility, or if the idea is okay):

Implement a full-time chat in game. At the moment, when we type in game, our chat disappears over time. It would be nice to have a permanent chat log that we could toggle on and off in game to reference what a friend or partner said.

Fixing hosting issues/forwarding ports. I'm beating a dead horse here, but fixing this would lead to an exponential amount of people returning to the server and/or staying more involved in the game longer. The fact that many people don't have access to their routers, or forward their ports correctly and still have issues is one of the primary reasons Warcraft 2 lacks growth and is slowly fading.

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but maybe we should host less tournaments. There has been a tournament participant fatigue that began roughly 1 year ago. Pball tournaments that fielded over 20 players can barely scrape 4-8 players together. Gow tournaments that had a full brackets can barely field a handful of teams and participants as well. I do enjoy the fact that admin and tourney hosts are inventive and are trying to switch up the themes, but there are like 4-5 tournaments within 3 weeks from friendly to $XX in winnings. We should ask the server and outlying players that log in from time to time for donations. Someone should spear head this (preferably an trustworthy admin) and put this towards server maintenance/upgrades. If we can come up with ~$3,000 in cash annually for tournaments from just from a handful of hosts, surely we can come up with much more than that from many people to give some thoughtful and meaningful upgrades to the server.

The server is pretty laggy. Finding regular reboots or something to fix this would be great. People conflict in games all of the time depending on who hosts the game. I'm not sure if there is a way around this.

Some sort of built in lag or latency repellent. It's crazy that I can play a complex high volume game like League of Legends without any lag, but can barely play Warcraft 2 without it lagging every 10 seconds.

Having more color schemes (like black to pink).

Implementing Warcraft 2 music in next patch.

Making it possible to have more than 8 player games (like 12 players, or 8 players and 4 watchers).

Create new races using Starcraft or Warcraft 3 as a template.

Upgrade graphics to higher DPI/resolution. (remastering)

Make humans more even to orcs. Healing is impractical and most people stop at knights. Either having a blacksmith upgrade to level 6 or 7 to make them stronger and equal to lust, or having their own version of lust would be great.

Getting warcraft 2 on more platforms. I know mousey and others worked on that once but that fell through.

Advertising the crap out of this game. It's still better than most modern games I play.

Resource sharing amongst partners or anyone in game. An example of this would be Age of Empires or Warcraft 3.

Create new units/buildings. Why can't we make demons? Or why can't we think of new units to make the game more versatile?

Put the Windows 10 fix within the download. I still can't figure out ddraw. Virtually everyone plays with Windows 10 and experiences the overlays from resolution problems.

Fix the ladder system so that Elo is the ladder determinent, not by beating someone from a higher # and cut it in half. I am currently ranked #6 with an Elo of 1436. Yet someone who is much better than me is ranked like #40 with 1750 elo. Elo = ladder = higher skill. I should be ranked #100.

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about coding, what it entails, costs, how much works has to be done, or if it is even possible without changing the game completely. However, here are some of my new ideas for the server (Please comment on the possibility, impossibility, or if the idea is okay):

Some nice ideas here, some of them have been covered already. Here's a bit of info.

Implement a full-time chat in game. At the moment, when we type in game, our chat disappears over time. It would be nice to have a permanent chat log that we could toggle on and off in game to reference what a friend or partner said.

This is an interesting idea. I think at the moment, in game chat is hard-coded to expire after 7 seconds on screen. IIRC its not hard to adjust that time to make it stay visible for longer.

Wouldn't be too difficult to log it to a text file, for example. Although that would be quite easy to edit so it wouldn't be "evidence" or whatever.

Fixing hosting issues/forwarding ports. I'm beating a dead horse here, but fixing this would lead to an exponential amount of people returning to the server and/or staying more involved in the game longer. The fact that many people don't have access to their routers, or forward their ports correctly and still have issues is one of the primary reasons Warcraft 2 lacks growth and is slowly fading.

If we can come up with ~$3,000 in cash annually for tournaments from just from a handful of hosts, surely we can come up with much more than that from many people to give some thoughtful and meaningful upgrades to the server.

The server is pretty laggy. Finding regular reboots or something to fix this would be great. People conflict in games all of the time depending on who hosts the game. I'm not sure if there is a way around this.

The server is not laggy, its great.

In-game lag/conflict has absolutely nothing to do with the server. WC2 games are 100% peer-to-peer the server is not involved.

Some sort of built in lag or latency repellent. It's crazy that I can play a complex high volume game like League of Legends without any lag, but can barely play Warcraft 2 without it lagging every 10 seconds.

Yes. WC2 was a pioneer in many respects. When people write modern games they are taking into accout the lessons learned from early games.

These days when somebody has a slow connection, thats on them - modern games allow for people, in effect "missing their turn" and allow the people with better connections to continue without them.

WC2 was written to demand communication from every player, every time. So if one player has a slow connection to any other player in the game, then the game lags for everyone, and a particularly bad connection between 2 individual players manifests as a "conflict".

Unfortunately fixing this would require entirely re-writing the way WC2 functions over a network .... pretty much re-writing the entire multiplayer part of the game fron the ground up.

Making it possible to have more than 8 player games (like 12 players, or 8 players and 4 watchers).

Create new races using Starcraft or Warcraft 3 as a template.

Upgrade graphics to higher DPI/resolution. (remastering)

Resource sharing amongst partners or anyone in game. An example of this would be Age of Empires or Warcraft 3.

Create new units/buildings. Why can't we make demons? Or why can't we think of new units to make the game more versatile?

Good luck There's been lots of discussion about these things, none of them are very likely. I have ideas about making a new front-end that would allow bigger resolution game-screens and possibly watchers also, but that is a lot of work and im sure not doing it this week lol.

Making demons *might* be possible with exe mods (see below).

More than 8 players, res-sharing and new races/units/buildings are just not possible without re-writing the entire game.

Make humans more even to orcs. Healing is impractical and most people stop at knights. Either having a blacksmith upgrade to level 6 or 7 to make them stronger and equal to lust, or having their own version of lust would be great.

Lots of people have ideas about this sort of stuff. Many of them are quite achievable by modding the exe. The thing is that all players in any game must have the same exe mods or people will just instantly drop. My LiveMod project was one possible way to achieve this. It worked by including a custom section in PUD files that had the mods for that map in it and was the patched into the exe in memory when the game started. In theory it works, but needs more development, and also the individual mods need to be developed and stable.

Getting warcraft 2 on more platforms. I know mousey and others worked on that once but that fell through.

The problem here is that we dont have the WC2 source code, Blizzard owns it and they're not sharing. So it's not a case of porting the code to a different platform, we have to get the Windows (or even Mac!) code to run on a different platform. This pretty much makes the only option some sort of virtual environment, i.e. DOSBox or a VM etc.

Put the Windows 10 fix within the download. I still can't figure out ddraw. Virtually everyone plays with Windows 10 and experiences the overlays from resolution problems.

Implementing Warcraft 2 music in next patch.

Fix the ladder system so that Elo is the ladder determinent, not by beating someone from a higher # and cut it in half. I am currently ranked #6 with an Elo of 1436. Yet someone who is much better than me is ranked like #40 with 1750 elo. Elo = ladder = higher skill. I should be ranked #100.

This sort of thing is up to iL to include, if he wants. AFAIK the music and ddraw aren't hard to include. A new ladder system would required some work but is achievable, but you would have to ask him about that stuff.

Advertising the crap out of this game. It's still better than most modern games I play.

I agree. In fact several people HAVE put a lot of work into advertizing the game lately. IMHO the biggest problem is that when new people check it out they often find a bunch of surley, abusive, arrogant wankers who just call them noob trash and ban them from games.

Clearly you know your stuff lamb, but what would this cost? Is there a way to get into the coding via hack? I mean iL somehow has codes, and there is W2 Combat and WAS W2 Custom, they have access to a lot of the codes no?

What would it cost to fix hosting issues? $10k USD? $3k USD? 100k USD? All or some of these ideas have to be possible, patch the ideas that work into the game and in order to play you HAVE to download the latest version. The fact that some people play with AH and some without is absolutely ridiculous. People are all playing with several different versions of W2.

Clearly you know your stuff lamb, but what would this cost? Is there a way to get into the coding via hack? I mean iL somehow has codes, and there is W2 Combat and WAS W2 Custom, they have access to a lot of the codes no?

What would it cost to fix hosting issues? $10k USD? $3k USD? 100k USD? All or some of these ideas have to be possible, patch the ideas that work into the game and in order to play you HAVE to download the latest version. The fact that some people play with AH and some without is absolutely ridiculous. People are all playing with several different versions of W2.

Clearly you know your stuff lamb, but what would this cost? Is there a way to get into the coding via hack? I mean iL somehow has codes, and there is W2 Combat and WAS W2 Custom, they have access to a lot of the codes no?

War2 combat is possible mostly because of the way the game is structured. Pretty much all the sound and graphics, the dialogs, some of the AI, the campaigns etc. are all stored in MPQ files. MPQ was reverse engineered in the late '90s so people have long been able to change/remove game elements, which is mainly what CE is. There are a couple of patches, like the no-cd loader, observer and warlatency etc, but basically the exe is 99.9% identical. The AH version added a small chunk of code that checks for some known hacks, but dosn't really change how the rest of the exe functions.

What would it cost to fix hosting issues? $10k USD? $3k USD? 100k USD? All or some of these ideas have to be possible, patch the ideas that work into the game and in order to play you HAVE to download the latest version. The fact that some people play with AH and some without is absolutely ridiculous. People are all playing with several different versions of W2.

Time is money, so how much it would cost depends on how long it would take. That being said it is something that I would like to do anyway, I would happily do it for free if I was independantly wealthy, which sadly I am not (any more).

Certainly I wouldn't ask for any money until I was sure I could produce results. I'm pretty sure I could, but too old to start making promises (let alone taking money) based on being "pretty sure".

The actual sending of packets to open ports is a very simple task, the real time would be in reverse engineering BNE to find exactly the right places to hook into the code to make it work with the game. This is an unknown time factor - sometimes these things can be found in 10 minutes - sometimes you can beat your head against a wall for weeks and still not find what you are looking for.

I'd like to think I could pay my bills and eat for something like 3-5k while I was doing it, but I really don't know without investigating further, which I plan to do.

In the mean time anyone who wants to donate to the Keep Lamby Above the Poverty Line fund is always welcome to do so lol

Haha, nice try tupac. You could build a mars shuttle too, but that still won't let people host games

--- edit ---

As for forcing people to use a specific version of the game, is up to the PvPGN server what clients it allows to connect, however if the hosting bug was fixed for CE only, then that would mean that people would be hosting games that only other people with CE could join, so it would effectively mean the end of using other clients in most cases.

Honestly cam is blithering about the server again and it is really just bunch of talk because i got as far as pball tournies are scraping 4-8 people and I stopped reading because let me enlighten you all, cam is a loud mouth drama queen who likes to talk about change but doesn't ever really do shit.

"PBall Tournies" went on hiatus for 8 months the last 4 have had 8, 10, 4, and the last 8 so cam knows nothing about anything as usual, and is really just a loud mouth retard who thinks hes saying something.

Thats cam for you though. Like I said a loud mouth, know nothing but say everything, dumb fuck who starts lots of drama.

Okay I'll let you have your moment now cam what were you saying about this game dying in 2018 when it came out in 1995? Go ahead.

Wow man I don't know where you are even coming from. Why the hate lol??? It wasn't a knock on you or your tourneys specifically. If you notice, there are like 10 tournaments scheduled within a few weeks of each other. In fact, I don't think anyone showed up to your last tournament.

And barring 1 that had 10, you just validated exactly what I said. Due to many factors including a smaller player pool than before, there is a tourney participation fatigue. It's an obvious phenomenon. When brilliant people like yourself and others took money from your own pocket to host tournaments for the first time, it was an awesome thing and people were excited to participate. Now it's just like... meh.

There are 0 daily active pball players anyways. Quick hasn't logged in awhile, you haven't been on, mano and I and you-know played a few games, but there is not a clear cut community like there once was. Please calm down... I don't get you sometimes. There was ZERO attack on you. We're talking about the server and how to improve it. If that's not something you are interested in, then don't post.

Edit: I'm also trying to be solution oriented and come up with ideas to help the server. In addition to, as I said in my disclaimer, I'm woefully ignorant on how to implement such solutions. I'm waiting for someone to say "I have the solution, but you have to give me $4k". If that's the case, then we or me can donate such to get this going. Even as a loyal War2er, I'm slowly becoming disenfranchized by comments like Smeagol's above and the lack of movement forward for this game. Ru killed East prematurely and it wasn't ready for the massive shift of players from Battle.net to PvPgn. So, I'm trying to fix it with the collective help of everyone. It just doesn't seem so simple. I wish we had more gurus or someone willing to do the fix, and hold the fix hostage for XXXX money and we pay it to fix this game. It sucks that few people are on, and even fewer can host. Currently 35 users online... at least 4 are bots, 20 are afk, and of the 11 actually online, 3 can host.

The last tournament got 8 people lol. The game is dying what do you think is going to happen it's old. Your trying to think of ways to make it go away isn't doing anything, you're basically blowing off hot air. I haven't played in months and when I log in I still see flea, mano still plays, proof, mariano, and other random people like igog and whoever else.

Where do you get the last didn't play it was PBall Balanced try being informed before talking is my point .